


But the greatest of these is love

by josephides



Category: Alpha and Omega - Patricia Briggs, Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-13
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:55:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24643678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephides/pseuds/josephides
Summary: She wished she’d said nothing, now. Wished she’d nodded and smiled and said ‘Oh, what an interesting mystery, enjoy yourselves’. It would have been a lie and Bran would have noticed, eventually. Eventually he would have looked at her. Eventually he would have heard it in her voice when he paid attention.orLeah's life is, like, so totally hard.
Relationships: Bran Cornick/Leah Cornick
Comments: 14
Kudos: 322





	But the greatest of these is love

**Author's Note:**

> I figured that everyone else has a horrifying backstory - why not Leah? Also. I love the concept that Leah's somehow the selfish one, when Bran married her purely to suit himself and claims not to love or like her? That's some dark shit.
> 
> Full disclosure: Everything I know about the US and specifically Montana I learnt from Google.
> 
> I had no intention of writing this pairing. 
> 
> Also - sorry for typos, inconsistencies, plot holes...

The agency sent a new girl to clean, which they were _expressly forbidden_ from doing without advance notice. After a furious phone call to the agency’s management to convey her feelings on this subject, Leah postphoned her morning plans and instead spent four hours stalking the girl around the house as she cleaned.

Humans, strange ones, were not given free range to wander around her home.

It was nearly midday when Bran emerged from his study and gave the girl a look as she was cleaning the baseboards, before he left to go somewhere.

“Will you be back?” Leah called, putting aside her magazine as she hurried-but-not-hurried after him. “Later?”

Bran frowned at her, somehow surprised by her asking. “Of course,” he said, as if he hadn’t previously disappeared for weeks on end without even a by-your-leave. As if she could forget that the _last time_ he had done it, it was so Charles could kill her for him. He shrugged on a jacket and left her with little more than a nod goodbye.

Leah bit her tongue.

“Do you want me to do the office, ma’am?” the girl asked, tentatively, eyes lowered.

Leah would give it to her - the young woman hadn’t crumbled under her furious glare like most humans did. “Absolutely not. _Never_ ,” she said. That was the one room anyone was forbidden from cleaning. Bran did it himself; it was the only room in the house where they kept secrets. 

The girl nodded, as if this wasn’t unusual behaviour. “Upstairs?”

Leah showed her upstairs. Leaving all the doors open, she arranged herself on the chair in her room, where she had another stack of magazines to while away her time. She listened with one ear as the girl cleaned first Bran’s bathroom, then Bran’s room, before starting work on the guest rooms. She then stood in the doorway to Leah’s bedroom suite, vacuum cleaner in her hand.

“This is a lovely room,” she said, smiling broadly as she looked around.

Something in Leah’s memory twinged. “Have we met before?”

“I don’t think so, ma’am. Unless – did you go to school with my sister?”

Leah had been in her early forties when she had been Changed. In her human life, she had born six children, three of whom had survived to adulthood. Life as a homesteader had worn lines in her weather-beaten skin and put grey in her blonde hair. It still surprised her, over two centuries later, that she had the body and appearance of her twenty-year-old self and that was how she appeared to others.

“No,” she said shortly, going back to her magazine.

The girl cleaned thoroughly and with enthusiasm but without the annoying tendency to hum like the other one did. She had an eye for detail and was surprisingly strong, moving the bed to dust behind it, climbing to reach the tops of cupboards and beating the rugs out of the windows.

Leah supposed she wasn’t precisely a girl. She was probably in her early thirties, though Leah struggled with human ages. She was tall and she was reasonably curvaceous, the gentle curve of her stomach suggesting she had born children, as well. There was no ring on her finger – but then there was no ring on Leah’s. She had dark blonde hair, streaked chemically, dark eyes and tanned skin that suggested she was of mixed ethnicity, somewhere back in her heritage. Her bone structure was good – sharp cheekbones and a determined chin.

With an abrupt realisation, Leah realised what it was she was seeing.

“Is your family from Montana?” she asked.

“I guess so. My great-great-great-grandparents moved from the Midwest to farm.”

“Oh really? Whereabouts?” Often people didn’t know where their family was from, these days, unless they had a particular European heritage of which they were inexplicably proud. 

“Um. Nebraska, I think.”

Leah nodded and watched her probable great-great-great-granddaughter clean.

*

When the girl had gone – and Leah had called the agency to instruct them that she would like her to become their regular cleaner – she re-started her tasks for the day. The first was a drive to Helena that she had been hoping to get out of the way early. It was a four-hour round trip, plus the cursory half an hour with the manager of the Centre who effusively accepted Leah’s donations.

“Oh, this is perfect, just perfect,” the woman, Margaret, said, looking at the neatly packed boxes of Sage’s clothes, along with the significant other donations from the rest of the women in the pack, including herself. Most humans annoyed Leah’s wolf – and Leah – but Margaret, strangely, escaped this fate. She reminded Leah of Sunny Madden.

“I’ve organised them, as per usual,” Leah said, tapping the labels she had written on the cardboard. The Centre had a programme for women who were trying to get back into work, which she liked, and she had ensured a number of the smarter items had been professionally cleaned and pressed so they were ready to wear. There was one small box that she opened to show Margaret. “This box is miscellaneous children’s clothes. I would say from eight years to early teens. We don’t have many children in town at the moment.”

“Thank you. That’s ideal.”

Leah nodded. She wrote Margaret a check, as she always did, and then pocketed the receipt as Charles always wanted it for their tax returns.

Her next stop was a small bank where she had an account under an old name. This account was, truly, her personal account since it wasn’t money Charles was aware of, or Bran for that matter. It wasn’t much, since she mostly topped it up with the leftovers of the allowance Bran allocated for her personal use, the money she made from the small amount of preserves she supplied to the general store and the occasional sale of any designer items of clothing she didn’t want any more. Still, forty years of investment wasn’t something to be sniffed at, though she imagined Charles would.

Charles would have wanted her to put it in the stock market, or something. _Invest_. Leah didn’t like numbers and she didn’t like risk. She liked her money, safely, in a bank where she could access it in an emergency.

This thought, ironically, was the last thought she had before a nervous, sweaty man pulled out a gun and started threatening people.

Astonished, she stared at him, this ridiculous figure who hadn’t even bothered to wear a mask. Did people still do this? She located _four cameras_ in the main room alone. He was stupider than she was, if he thought he was going to get away with it.

Then the man on her left manhandled her to the floor. “Get down,” he hissed, probably thinking he was being heroic.

Leah lay on the floor, nose pinched at the scent of a carpet that needed a good wash. “This is tedious,” she muttered. There was something sticky under her fingers. Disgusting. She felt the imprint of the man’s hands on her, still, though he had only touched her briefly. Very few men touched her.

Unlike the movies, the bank didn’t carry much physical money and the sweaty little man probably only escaped with a couple of thousand dollars. They heard the police sirens chase him down the street and then two local cops started interviewing for statements. Leah neatly side-stepped this and decided she’d come back to deposit her money later. There were plenty of witnesses; she wouldn’t be missed.

At a loose end, Leah walked down the street, past the small crowd of interested humans, to a small café. She ordered a coffee and went to sit in the window to watch the late afternoon traffic.

Her cell phone rang and she sighed at the screen. Anna.

“Hello,” Leah answered.

“Hi, I’m about to drive up to the site and wanted to know if you wanted to come with me?” her all-but daughter-in-law asked. Like all of the strays Bran brought home, Anna was a goodie-two-shoes and since the moment they had met – when, admittedly, Leah hadn’t shown herself in her best light – Anna had been _trying_ to get into Leah’s good books. It always back-fired. The girl had an innate ability to rub Leah up the wrong way. Leah found herself wanting to disagree with almost everything Anna ever said.

With a pang, a familiar one, Leah realised Anna had been informed of the day’s situation before she had. “I’m in Helena,” she said, dampeningly.

“Oh.” Anna paused. She was smart; she knew immediately what had happened. “What an _ass_ ,” she said.

Surprised, Leah snorted. The implied criticism of Bran helped, in this instance. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes her wolf wanted to defend Bran’s actions. He was the Marrok, their Alpha and no one should criticise him – an edict the mate of her first Alpha had beaten into her. “What site? What happened?”

“There was a landslide. One of the Wildlings found what they think is some kind of old, ritual kill site. Bones and death. Spooky,” Anna announced, sounding delighted.

“I see.” It was precisely the sort of mystery Bran liked and sounded reasonably non-threatening. At least it was close to home. “I won’t be back for a few hours. Go ahead without me.”

“Okay. Maybe we could go up again tomorrow, if you’d like.”

“Thank you,” she said, without thinking. She hung up before she could hear in her voice how pleased Anna was with how the conversation had gone.

*

It was dark by the time she got home. The house was dark, too. It smelt pleasingly of the environmentally-friendly cleaning products she asked the agency to use and the place was still spotless, not desecrated by the trail of pack who regularly communed in her living room and didn’t tidy up after themselves.

She put the TV on, safe in the knowledge that Bran wasn’t there to silently criticise her popular television choices, and went to make herself dinner.

Leah liked cooking. She was reasonably good at it, particularly the large-scale cooking they often had to do for big pack gatherings. Tonight, she felt like comfort food. She pulled out the remains of a chicken – another sign that no one had been in the house that day – and made a quick, rough puff pastry, then popped it into the fridge to chill. She chopped up some vegetables, sautéed them in butter and garlic, and stripped the leftover chicken and warmed everything in a pan with the contents of a can of mushroom soup, seasoned well with pepper. She tasted it, added a little Dijon mustard and a splash of heavy cream and then set it aside whilst she put potatoes on to boil. She rolled out the pastry and built her pie, shoved it in the oven and set about making mashed potato.

She ate her dinner on her own, watching a truly terrible reality television show with some truly terrible people in it. She laughed at them, out loud. Sometimes it was good to be alone in the house.

Then, still alone, she showered and went to bed.

She was nearly asleep when she heard him come back. She had, as usual, left the adjoining door to their rooms open a crack, an invitation which tonight he accepted. He climbed into her bed with damp hair and pulled her towards him.

She blinked up at him and opened her mouth to ask him about the ritual site they had discovered but he stopped her with an intent kiss and if there was one thing she knew about Bran, it was that he was only really _with her_ when he was inside of her. She would take that, any day, she would take that.

Afterwards, Leah tried to control the after-shocks of pleasure that he had wrought. Bran lay on his back with an arm over his eyes, panting slightly. She didn’t know where the comforter was, on the floor somewhere, kicked off in the middle of their battle to see who would be on top. She crawled up on all fours to investigate, knowing that she had a limited window to convince him to stay with her, and Bran’s hand slid between her thighs from behind, stroking up so his thumb could tease where she was still wet from him. 

She sat back on her haunches, watching him when he put his thumb into his mouth and sucked the taste of them from it. His eyes glinted in the dark and he smiled at her. It wasn’t a nice smile but one of his secret ones, his dark ones.

She loved it.

She loved _him_.

*

She woke, satiated, and was surprised to see that he was still there, his face soft and young in sleep, his arm still draped over her waist. Bran was usually an early riser and tended to sneak out of her room before she was awake, as if he could pretend that the night had never happened at all. 

She inched her way closer to him and his eyes opened, a darker hazel in the morning light. For a second, she thought she saw something in his eyes, something that made her chest clench painfully with hope, and then it was gone, just a trick of the light. He rolled onto his back, away from her, and stretched. She watched the flex of the muscles of his chest and abdomen and felt anew the stirrings of desire.

Bran turned his head towards her, knowingly.

Sex was just sex, Leah told herself, as they kissed, as she made herself available to him. He knew her body, just as she knew his – anyone could learn that. He could make her sigh and he could make her scream.

This morning he was easy. She pushed him onto his back and took him inside her, rising and falling whilst he held her hips and closed his eyes. She came moments before he did and then gazed down at him as he was overcome with his own orgasm, his fingers digging hard into her flesh, bruising her.

She loved watching his face, when he was lost for that rapturous moment. _I did that,_ she thought.

She held him as he softened inside her and then she got up to shower. She didn’t want to look sentimental.

*

That morning she was inspecting one of their properties that had been “rented” out to a woman who had escaped Chastel’s regime, a submissive werewolf who had arrived with shadows under her eyes and almost entirely tongue tied. Nothing Bran, or Anna, could do would get the woman to discuss her time with that monster.

Leah, who was a firm believer that monstrous things in the past were best left in the past, was nevertheless glad when Bran placed her elsewhere. Submissives, even broken ones, were always welcome in packs and whilst she had been in Aspen Creek, Bran had been troubled.

It wasn’t surprising that the submissive had left the property in an immaculate condition.

“I think it needs decorating,” Leah said, pointing at the soot that tinted the walls above the fireplace, a little bit of damp in the hall. “If we want to rent it out properly again.” They had charged the woman a pittance, more for her pride than anything else.

Their agent agreed. “Do you want to go with the same company as last time?’

“Yes.” The company were owned, indirectly, by Bran. She looked around, running her hand over the furniture, testing the table, the chairs in the open plan kitchen. Everything was good quality, built to last. It was a little… old fashioned. Leah read interior design magazines extensively, trying to keep herself up to date. The dark wood, the heavy drapes, all leaned towards an older era. “I might get them to paint the woodwork, the kitchen cupboards. Something a little fresher.”

“What about the bathroom?”

They both studied the bathroom. It was reasonably new, though Leah noticed that the tap was dripping. “I’ll get someone to look at that,” she said. Tag was pretty handy with that sort of thing. The tiles were fine, no-nonsense white with a grey trim. They’d do for another couple of years.

Leah’s next stop was Asil because she liked to schedule a weekly argument with him and because, when she had cleared out Sage’s things, she had found photos of them – Sage and Asil - together. At first, she had thrown them away because they made her feel sick. Then she had dug them out again, unsure if she had the right to get rid of them herself.

Asil had been the one who tracked Sage down, who exacted the punishment she deserved. She didn’t expect he would cherish the photos. The opposite, in fact. But she would give him the choice.

“Burn them,” Asil said, shaking his head when she proffered them.

She put them into her bag. “I’ll do that.”

He hesitated, half turned towards his roses. “She was masterful at it.”

Leah pressed her lips together. “We won’t let it happen again.”

*

Anna was at home when Leah returned. “Fancy a drive?” she asked, brightly, twirling car keys around her finger.

The perkiness was almost painful. Leah hung up her bag so Anna couldn’t see the reflexive sneer on her face. “I need to change.”

In her bedroom, she put on clothes she wouldn’t mind if they got damaged – a pair of her less good jeans, a T-shirt and a button-up that had once been Bran’s and put on her hiking boots. She tied her hair up and took out her earrings and looked in the mirror. A young woman looked back at her. She tilted her head to the side and studied the firm jawline that had passed down to the girl who had cleaned for her yesterday.

She frowned in the mirror. She really ought to find out the girl’s name. 

She hurried from the room.

“One more thing,” Leah said, downstairs, passing Anna to go to the kitchen. She pulled out a couple of large containers of pasta salad, then grabbed the backpack with the pile of compostable, disposable bowls, cutlery, and several bottles of water, that she had put out on the counter that morning. She walked briskly to Anna, who was patiently waiting in the front hallway. “Let’s go.”

In the passenger seat of the truck, Leah studied the route Anna used. She was terrible with maps, always had been – the tiny names and little symbols would swim in front of her eyes and give her a headache – so she learnt through doing. If she needed to return on her own, she would follow the markers she had memorised, usually formations of rock, trees, even the site of where something had happened before. Places where people had died.

It was a long, circular route, by car, to get to the site. After a while, Leah wondered if perhaps they should have Changed first, travelled more directly, but she guessed it would still have been a long journey regardless. Anna, who had once been a novice to mountain driving, managed the increasingly smaller tracks with patience and expertise. Leah was quietly impressed, not that she would ever have verbalised this.

The route was so circular that at first Leah didn’t immediately place the location in her head. Anna pulled up with a set of three other cars – Bran’s, Charles’, Tag’s – and they got out. “It’s about a half hour walk up here,” she said, nodding up through the trees.

Leah looked up. A small frisson of alarm shot up her spine. “A landslide, you said,” she repeated. Anna took the containers of food whilst Leah flung the backpack over her shoulder.

“Looks like. They spent most of yesterday clearing the area.”

“Hmm.”

If Anna noticed Leah’s discomfort, she didn’t mention it, just headed off into the trees. The further they walked, the more Leah became convinced she knew where they were going, she knew what they had discovered.

She packed the feeling down, glad, for once, that her mate bond with Bran was so tightly controlled by him that their mental engagement was limited. She could feel him – knew he was close – but that was about it. He would have the same sense of her.

That was good.

They broached a level shelf in the mountain. The landslide had been a big one, with boulders the size of cabins. No wonder it had taken them all day to clear a path into the cave it had partially revealed. She wondered at the scent of death that still lingered, after all this time. The smell was primal. Fear. Terror.

They’d spread tarps on the ground in front, sorting bones. They all looked up when she and Anna arrived and then most went back to work. Tag's eyes, predictably, alighted on the food Anna as carrying. His face lit up. “Thank you, little lady,” he said warmly to Anna, approaching her.

“Leah made it, actually,” Anna said, drily.

Leah waited, gritting her teeth.

“Ah. Thanks,” Tag said, begrudgingly, not meeting her gaze.

“You’re welcome.” She handed him the backpack – instead of throwing it over the ledge, like she wanted to - because there were some battles that were worth fighting and some that were not. “Bowls and cutlery in there, as well as some water.”

Tag, at least, looked vaguely chastened. She and Tag had once been friendly but, like many of the werewolves in the pack, they had fallen out over Mercy.

Leah walked over to her husband, who was crouched down over the largest collection of bones.

“Human, as far as we can tell,” he said, not looking up. “Male. His skull has been caved in. Likely what killed him.”

Leah nodded. “And the others?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.

“A few animals but also human females, we think. From the predation on the bones, we suspect he was eating them. They had various broken bones, as well.”

Charles walked over, joined by Anna. “We found some coins.” He held them out in the palm of his hand so Anna could look through them. They were worn but recognisable. “18th Century, I think. We’ll do a DNA test on the bones but I suspect this is a good enough clue to date the site.”

“Cool,” Anna said, touching the coins like they were treasure, her small face lit up with excitement. “So, not witchcraft?”

“No,” Bran said, confidently, rising from his crouch. “Good, old fashioned cannibalism. They may well have been trapped in there.”

“Do you want to look inside? There’s some interesting markings on the wall,” Charles asked, aiming his question at Anna, like a teenage boy inviting his crush into the house of horrors, then he cast Leah a cursory look, a last minute invitation. The third wheel, as the expression went.

Leah looked up at the cave entrance. She had no desire to go back inside. “I’m good,” she said, making a decision. Rip the band-aid off fast, another thing people said. “I’ve seen it.”

The three of them looked at her. Bran’s eyebrows raised, his expression mildly curious. “You have?”

“Yes.” Leah looked down at the bones beneath them. She pointed at the skull, at the crevice that had ended his life. “I did that. And some of the bones are from the body of my eldest daughter.” She turned to look at the four other tarps set up, as if she would be able to tell. She couldn’t, of course. Not unless she got up close and she had no intention of doing so. Alice had been small, though. Delicate.

“ _Leah_ ,” Bran said, bringing her attention back to him.

She felt his hand grasp her wrist and she shook it off, frowning at him. She rubbed her wrist, thinking he had held on too hard, forgetting his strength. “He wasn’t _human_ ,” she said defensively, prickled by his scrutiny. “This was the werewolf that Changed me.”

She was aware that, around them, the other members of the pack had stopped working, had paused their industrious sniffing and sorting the bones of the young women who had died around her.

“When we met, you were part of St. John’s pack,” Bran said, pushing. His eyes were very dark now. She looked away. This band-aid was taking a long time to come off.

“I was.” Bran had bartered for her. That had been the way of it then. Female werewolves were rare. Costly. “He found me, after I escaped. Taught me. But he didn’t Change me. I never said he did.”

And Bran had never asked. She had been relieved. He had wanted a strong mate. Strong mates didn’t come with a disgusting backstory.

Leah found she didn’t want to talk about it any more, much as she had never wanted to talk about it then. It was done. “I want to go back to the house now,” she said to, no, _ordered_ , Anna.

Anna nodded, rapidly. She was looking a little pale. “Yes, absolutely. I’ll take you back.” She released Charles’s arm, which she appeared to have grabbed at some point as if she needed her husband to hold her up, and reached instead for Leah.

Leah shook her off as well. “Don’t fuss,” she said, annoyed and embarrassed.

*

Anna continued to be annoying. She kept looking at her and wouldn’t leave the house. It was enough to make Leah lose her temper, which she did. “Go away,” she snapped, drawing on Bran’s strength to try and push her out.

It – predictably – didn’t work. Omegas were far more trouble than they were worth, she thought.

“Bran wants me to stay until he gets back.”

“Does he.” Leah narrowed her eyes, wondering how this agreement had been met without her overhearing it. Bran rarely spoke to her mind-to-mind, making it clear that this intimacy was not something he was willing to share with her. 

She wished she’d said nothing, now. Wished she’d nodded and smiled and said ‘Oh, what an interesting mystery, enjoy yourselves’. It would have been a lie and Bran would have noticed, eventually. Eventually he would have looked at her. Eventually he would have heard it in her voice when he paid attention.

 _Eventually_.

But she always tried to be honest, with Bran. Even if she didn’t like the repercussions. 

Leah found something truly obnoxious on the television and sat in front of it, pulling one of her magazines onto her lap. “I think I’ll have a glass of wine,” she said, after an hour of enjoying the horrified expressions that crossed Anna’s face as the plot of the show unfolded with boring predictability.

“I’ll get it,” Anna said, jumping up.

Leah smirked. Perhaps she could get Anna to make her something for dinner, if she was going to loiter unhelpfully like this.

Anna brought back a bottle of red – one of the good ones – and two glasses. The quantity she poured herself was truly impressive. “I know it doesn’t do anything,” Anna said, shrugging, “But I like to pretend.”

Leah had never drunk wine – or much alcohol at all - before she had been Changed so she had nothing to compare it to. She just liked the taste. She accepted the wine glass, with its more more modest pouring and watched her daughter-in-law drink half the glass in one gulp.

There was, perhaps, a little joy to be had in knowing she had truly freaked Anna out. That was quite fun.

Anna cleared her throat. “I didn’t know you’d had children.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“I know but. Well. I knew Bran had children. Has them.”

Leah said nothing. She looked at the television screen resolutely. Was she going to have to have this conversation with Bran, as well? She had told him that she had been married, that there had been children. He hadn’t cared overmuch, from what she recalled. Why would he? By the time they had met, the children were a memory from a different life. 

She didn’t want to talk about the monster in the cave.

Leah took a sip of her wine. On screen, the lead character’s spouse left, to the surprise of no one. Dreadful couple. Utterly unsuited to each other.

A car drew up outside. Bran’s truck. Leah dropped her head back on the couch cushions and prayed that Charles wasn’t also with him, that this wouldn’t turn into a _family meeting_. A family she was not part of.

Bran came in, alone, and hung up his coat, kicked off his boots. He glanced, critically, at the television screen and then touched Anna on the shoulder, an unmistakeable ‘thank you’. Leah took another sip of her wine. She could count on one hand the number of times Bran had affectionately touched her that week outside of the bedroom. Or she would have been able to, if he had at all.

It was challenging loving and hating someone in equal measures, she thought.

“If you drink pure ethanol in large quantities, you can still get drunk,” Leah said to Anna, as it occurred to her it wasn’t the sort of thing Charles would ever tell her. “You could try that.”

Anna blinked. “Oh really.”

“Anna, Charles is waiting for you at home,” Bran said, dismissing her.

Anna gave Bran a challenging look, as if she was thinking of not tolerating his dismissal, but jumped up. “I’ll see you both tomorrow.”

Leah _strongly_ hoped not.

*

Bran worked with silence which meant he sat on the adjacent couch whilst Leah pretended to watch the next episode of the show and said nothing. She _knew_ this was a tactic he used. Knew it because he had used it on her in the past, as well as many, many others. He would sit there and wait for her to speak. That way he had no culpability for what was volunteered.

She had to stop him.

She mentally reviewed the television schedule, trying to line up a series of shows she could torment him with. The reality TV was the worst but it was the wrong night for it. Perhaps a telenovela. There was a whole channel dedicated to them. She could switch over and—

“Stop it,” he said, with a growl.

She flinched.

Sighing, Bran stood and came to stand over her. He took her wine glass from her hand and put it down on the coffee table, which he then sat on. “How do you suggest I get the information I want from you? Hmm?”

Leah thought about it. “Perhaps a nicely-worded letter?” Not that she found his handwriting remotely legible.

He bent and gripped her chin, turning her to face him. She slanted her eyes to the right so she couldn’t look at him and feel the pressure to obey. “Don’t be childish,” he ordered. 

She pouted. “I just don’t see why it’s necessary.”

“Finding out my mate was tortured and Changed is a fairly significant piece of information to receive.”

“What Change isn’t torture?” she spat back, pulling away from him. “ _You_ know that as well as anyone.”

 _That_ hurt him. She was glad. “It’s not the same thing, Leah. It’s consensual.”

“Yours wasn’t. Neither was mine. Neither was Anna’s, for that matter. Or Samuel’s,” she said. She threw up a hand. _See?_ _I’m no different than the rest of your family._ “It’s in the past, Bran. Leave it alone. You’re normally _so happy_ to leave things alone.”

Her husband’s temper was boiling over, but it wasn’t hot, instead it was like ice, chilling her. She was finding it difficult to argue with him. She tried closing her eyes but that made it worse because there had never been safety in darkness. She crawled further away from him, down the length of the couch.

“I’m surprised at you,” he said, coldly. “I would have expected you would enjoy the attention this revelation has caused.”

His disgust of her was evident. She wanted to curl around a pillow and hide her face. Instead, she sat with her back ramrod straight. “Don’t be cruel,” she said, attempting to make it sound like she wasn’t begging but likely failing. “Just this once, could you try not to be cruel?”

Bran at there for a moment longer and then, with a noise of frustration, he walked off. A few moments later, she heard the front door close behind him.

*

Bran did not return the next day. Nor the next.

Used to this, Leah went about her business. She looked at paint chips and briefed the decorators for a quote to paint the rental. She asked Tag to look at the plumbing. She made a few batches of stews and casseroles to freeze and followed-up on the evaluations for the wolves who had been changed the previous October. She had some satisfying arguments with Asil and took Kara shopping for new school clothes.

She went to Helena to deposit more money. No one tried to rob the bank, which was a refreshing change.

The following day, Leah carried out her least favorite job, her own personal torment. The Alpha Females.

She started with Bran’s favorite, Mercy, his almost-love, because it was always best to get her out of the way first. 

“Everything’s fine, my husband isn’t abusing me,” Mercy said, picking up the phone the way she always did.

“That’s _not_ \--” Leah growled and just hung up. There was no point.

The phone rang, almost immediately. She answered, scowling. “I’m sorry,” Mercy sighed. “Everything really is fine.”

“ _Good_.”

“I know you have to do this. It’s a valuable exercise.” Mercedes sounded as if she had practiced this speech. Or perhaps had someone force her to say it.

Leah wanted to bang her head on the table. Contrary to what the rest of Aspen Creek thought, Leah was actually quite well liked outside of the pack. The rest of the Alpha mates and wives happily spoke to her. She would go so far as to say most of them even _respected_ her. She listened to their problems and escalated when necessary. That was her _job_. “Thank you for the update,” she said, through her teeth.

Her tone set Mercy off. “My _pleasure_.”

They both hung up.

Leah went out for a quick run before she tackled the rest of the list, to expel some of the rage-energy Mercedes always brought out of her.

Roseanna, Phillipe’s mate, raised a red flag which, since Bran wasn’t around and had left his cell in his study, the door of which he had locked, Leah was forced to inform Charles.

“Hmm,” Charles said down the phone.

Leah waited. She waited some more. She waited _quite long enough_ thank you. “Well?” she asked.

“I think I need to speak to Da.”

She wanted to scream. “You do that.” She hung up.

It had not been a good day.

*

For the fourth morning in a row, Leah woke and Bran was not beside her, not in his bedroom, not in the house.

She could only assume he had gone to deal with some other business, that this wasn’t some epic sulk in response to her quite rational desire to forget her past. Bran didn’t sulk, anyway. He certainly didn’t sulk about her. It was usually, she admitted, the other way around.

It wasn’t as if she needed Bran on a day to day basis. If there was no drama, they lived reasonably independent lives.

Still. There were things she wanted to know. Things she had thought of, in passing.

She gave in and called Charles. “What have you done with the….” She paused, not sure how to word it. “… cave.”

She heard the squeak of Charles’s chair. “Well, we removed all the remains. We’re trying to have the DNA of the bones analysed, so we can have a record. If we are able to do so, would you like to have the remains of your child?” he asked, carefully toneless.

Leah had thought about it. “Can you have them cremated?” she asked.

“Of course.” There was a pause. “There were some other things found. Some jewellery. A wedding ring. A necklace. Do you think they might be yours?”

“Possibly,” she said. “Did the ring have an inscription?”

“Yes, though it’s a little difficult to read.”

She thought about it, visualised the ring that had been placed on her finger when she was seventeen. She sighed. “Faith, hope and love?” 

“It could be.”

“That was mine. The necklace… I don’t remember.” There had been other women there. It wasn’t as if she had memorised what they had been wearing. Several of them had been in serious states of decay. 

“Anna will bring them by later. You can take a look.”

Leah caught her top lip in her teeth and then gave in and asked, though it killed her to do so. “Do you know where your da is?”

“He took the bones to Missoula and is staying there whilst we get the results on the DNA. We don’t know how long it will take.”

She grunted. That seemed like something Bran could have delegated. Or perhaps written her a note about. “Is he still angry with me?”

Charles sighed. “I suspect he’s really only angry with himself. Though it may not appear that way. You know how he is.”

She thought about what Anna had said. “He’s an ass.”

Charles laughed, the kind of laugh that sounded like it had jumped out at him. “He can be, yes.”

Leah ended the phone call, feeling pleased with herself. Sometimes she could almost like Charles, when he wasn’t being frightening.

*

“This was Alice’s,” Leah mused, turning the necklace over in her hand. She had already slid the ring onto her finger, like she had never taken it off. “We gave it to her for her sixteenth birthday.”

The locket wasn’t anything particularly special, not in today’s terms - underneath the grime, it was silver, etched with a floral pattern. The metal burnt her werewolf fingers when once she had been able to wear it against her skin. “It was an heirloom. My mother’s.” Thoughtfully, she rubbed the front with her thumb. Her finger came away red. Much more and it would blister and bleed. She would have to get it professionally cleaned.

“We couldn’t open it,” Anna said, wearing the same expression she had worn when Charles had handed her the coins. “I didn’t want to damage it.”

Leah shook her head. “It was a lock of her baby hair and ours. It’s probably long gone.”

Her daughter-in-law’s face was soft. “Was he a nice man? Your husband?”

Anna asked it so innocently, so devoid of the rabid interest that Leah expected she felt, that Leah found herself agreeable to answering. “He was. A very nice man.”

She felt soft, herself, thinking about him. Lawrence. She had been fond of him. Or perhaps it had been love? She couldn’t feel it now, not where she was, who she was now. Not compared to the excruciating agony that was loving Bran. She had no soft feelings any more.

The girl who had married Lawrence had been excitable and naïve, who thought the Bible inscription in her wedding ring the peak of romance. They had travelled together to seek their fortune and adventure in the West, leaving behind their families, never to be seen again. She had worked hard. She had children, raised them to be God-fearing Christians, just as she had been raised to be. She had been kidnapped and raped by a monster and remembered praying as she lay dying.

Leah sucked in a breath.

“It’s okay,” Anna whispered, radiating soothing quietness. Her small hand rested on Leah’s clenched fist. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

“Of course I’m okay,” she snapped. She stood up, abruptly, forcing Anna to do the same. “I’ve got things to do.”

“Of course. I’ll see myself out.”

*

Leah used a chair to reach the top of one of the built-in cupboards in her bedroom. She reached to the very back, feeling around for the box she knew was hidden there, and then carefully coaxed it out with the tips of her fingers. It took several, frustrating minutes and would have been easier if she had got the step-ladder from the garage.

Eventually, triumphantly, she pulled the box free and jumped down to sit on the bed.

The contents of the box did not reflect the efforts Leah went to hide it. There was a small, tin brooch that had once been brightly painted with enamel. The first gift Bran had ever given her. In a ring box there was a curl of dark hair – Charles’s – from when he was a little boy, plaited with some of her own hair and some of Bran’s and tied off with a bit of string. She winced, every time she saw that, reminded of her romantic notions of family. A champagne cork with a coin from the celebration after their current house had been built, a yellow hair ribbon from a county fair, and a silver bullet she had pulled from Bran’s shoulder. And, finally, a photograph of Bran, that she had taken herself with a Polaroid camera.

She held the photograph for a long minute. The photo was a lie because in that one moment, that fleeting second, she had caught him when it looked as though he had been looking at her with love. 

She both loved and hated this photo. She had nearly destroyed it many times. 

Blowing air through her teeth, Leah replaced it quickly, feeling as if she was too close to the edge to deal with this level of pathetic sentimentality. She pulled the wedding ring from her finger, dropped it in the box. She had wrapped the locket in a soft cloth and she tucked that into the box as well. There was no need to clean it. She could never wear it. Never give it to anyone.

She climbed up on the chair again and pushed the box to the back of the cupboard. “Done,” she said, to herself, metaphorically washing her hands of it and its contents.

Time to forget about it.

*

Bran returned, as he always did.

He thought he was so clever, timing it it so that he could slip into her bedroom at night and skip over any conversation by initiating sex instead. She rolled her eyes even as he went down on her. Difficult to argue with a man whose mouth was otherwise occupied, she thought, having a little laugh to herself.

She stopped laughing after the first orgasm and, by the time the third was wrought from her, was whimpering. When he finally slid inside of her, she was so over-sensitised she shrieked and clawed at his back, bit him on the shoulder and tried to get away. He _liked_ that and just held her tighter, rubbed her throbbing clitoris with his thumb as he moved inside of her, her legs over his shoulders. He felt huge and hot, inside, stretching her in near-painful ways.

“Nononono, Bran,” she said, near tears. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

She saw the flash of his teeth. “You can,” he said, proving it, thrusting so hard that she saw stars. She came, one last time, and felt the edges of her vision grey as she bucked up, hard, against him. She was utterly limp as he finished inside of her, couldn’t move a muscle. He lay heavily on her, covering her from head to toe. Every breath he took pressed her down into the mattress.

“You bit me,” he said into the pillow by her left ear.

“You deserved it.”

“No, I mean, you really bit me.” He levered himself up, easing himself from her, and showed her his shoulder.

“Oh, God, that’s a lot of blood,” she said, surprised. She ran her hand across the back of her mouth, tasting him. “I’ll get a cloth.”

She padded to and from the bathroom and tossed a damp hand-towel at him. He raised his eyebrows. “It’s _hardly_ life threatening,” she snorted. “Get up. I need to strip the sheets. I don’t want blood on the mattress.”

Bran did as he was bid and went to sit in the chair, naked, the towel pressed to his shoulder. He watched her strip the bed and check that the blood hadn’t gone through. She leaned against the mattress, thinking she was still a little wobbly from being pounded into it just minutes before. She felt well used, in that pleasant, satisfied way.

“Shall we just go sleep in my bed?” Bran suggested.

She nodded. She would deal with the bed in the morning. 

*

When the ashes were delivered – by courier, in a prosaic white, plastic cylinder, no less – she walked out into the forest and perfunctorily distributed the remains amongst the trees and bushes. It was better than being trapped in a cave, she thought.

After that, it felt like things returned to normal. As normal as they ever got.

“What’s wrong with the girl?” Bran asked, during one of their rare meals together.

Through sheer coincidence, they had ended up cooking together and then sat at the corner of the table in the dining room to eat. It was probably the closest they got to a normal evening and Leah was enjoying the pretence that he might enjoy her company. 

“What girl? Kara?”

“No. The girl. The one who cleans now.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her. Why? Do you think there is?” It wasn’t like Bran to comment on the cleaning – he wasn’t particular about anywhere outside of his study.

Bran took a deep breath, as if this conversation was trying when to Leah’s mind he wasn’t being remotely clear. “I mean, you stay in and watch her clean. You have never done that before.”

“Oh. _Oh_.” Leah sat back, realising she’d never told him, completely forgotten to. “She’s my… great-something-granddaughter. It’s fascinating.”

He put down his knife with a clunk. “What?”

She speared a potato, happily. “Yes. I thought she looked familiar and then it clicked. I’ve looked her up and she’s descended from me through her mother.” Once she’d got her full name from the agency, she had done some fairly painful Internet searches, looking through local newspaper articles and then a trip to the library where a nervous young man had helped her search through the archives.

She realised Bran might enjoy that story, of her human detective work, so she opened her mouth to tell him, only to have him interrupt.

“Have you told Charles?” he asked, eyes piercing her.

Leah began to feel as if she was treading through an unexpected minefield. She had been in a field of wildflowers and now she was in a minefield. How had that happened? “Why would I tell Charles?”

“Your great-something-granddaughter turns up to clean our house and you think that’s a coincidence?” he snapped at her sharply, getting up from the table. Moments later, she heard him on the phone to his son.

Leah finished her meal, or tried to. She supposed the girl would be taken away from her now, which was a shame. She moved a few potatoes around, a hot ball of twisting nerves in her throat preventing her from eating any further. When it became clear that Bran wasn’t returning any time soon, she put the remains of her food on his plate and put that in the refrigerator, in case he got hungry later.

She allowed herself one small, very quiet cry in the shower, then washed her face, her hair, her body and went to bed. Tomorrow was a new day, she told herself, closing her eyes firmly.

*

It was a new day but it wasn’t any better. She was _sad_.

Leah didn’t get sad. She got angry. She got frustrated. She _hit_ things.

She tried to get angry about being sad but that didn’t work. She Changed and took herself for a long run, hoping to tire her emotions out. She caught a rabbit and crunched her way through it and _still felt sad_. Back home, she Changed back and gave herself a pep talk in the mirror of her bathroom. “Get over it, Cornick,” she muttered, brushing her bared teeth.

She brushed her hair and French plaited it because once Bran had said he liked it that way. She put her diamond earrings in. She applied some make-up. She thought of the locket in her keepsake box and burst into tears with a suddenness that shocked her.

“ _Goddamnit_ ,” she swore, wiping her eyes with the back of her hands and smearing freshly applied mascara.

In the end, she decided the only sensible thing to do would be to go back to bed. She couldn’t let anyone see her like this.

Bran came up, later, when it was dark. Leah tried to make herself as small as possible under the comforter, ashamed of herself and her weakness and that he would see it.

“Have you been in bed all afternoon?” he asked from the foot of her bed.

She squeezed her eyes shut and willed him to leave.

Bran stayed where he was for a full minute before he spoke again. “The girl—“

Leah couldn’t bear it. “It’s okay, you can take her away,” she said quickly, trying to get the words out without inflection. Perhaps if she just _agreed_ he would stop. “You were right. I was _stupid_.” 

She hunched her shoulders, waiting for him to confirm it. Instead, he said nothing, then she heard him start to take off his clothes. _Nonononononono,_ she thought, her wolf raising her head in sympathy. She couldn’t have sex, not right now. She had never felt more physically un-ready to have sex with him. She thought she might scream. 

The mattress dipped. Panic coursed through her, clumping in her throat. Frantically, Leah fought her way free of the cocoon she had wrapped herself in and crawled out of bed. “No,” she said, backing into the corner of the bedroom until her spine hit the wall. The wolf could defend her from here, she thought. “ _Please_.”

Bran sat very still. He wasn’t actually naked – he had left his shorts on. He stared at her like he had never seen her before. “I’m not going to touch you if you don’t want me to,” he said, slowly.

“ _Don’t make me_ ,” she said, speaking before she thought. She amended her statement. “I mean. I’m just not in the mood for sex _.”_

They both thought about that for a moment. Likely, Leah thought, because it wasn’t a sentence she had ever said out loud.

“Leah, I’m not going to make you have sex.” Bran frowned at her. “I hope I have never _made_ you, before.”

“I don’t mean—you haven’t—“ _Strong_ , Leah told herself. She closed her eyes. She was strong. “I’m just not in the mood.”

“I’m not taking the girl away from you,” Bran said, changing the subject, to her eternal relief. “Charles has done a background check on her, a very thorough one. She’s exactly as you said. She can stay and work here, as much as you want.”

Leah took a moment to process this. It was good news – she was glad - but it didn’t, actually, make her feel less sad. “Good,” she said, slowly, feeling through her emotions, poking at them. The wolf winced.

“I’m sorry I walked away from you yesterday.”

She lifted her chin. She had no idea what was happening, it was all changing too fast, but she recognised it was important to try and regain ground. She had to be honest. “There’s no need to apologize. Of course it looked suspicious. I can see that now.”

He acknowledged her words with a small nod. “And I’m sorry for hurting you.”

That was two ‘sorrys’ in as many minutes. A record, Leah thought. She straightened against the wall and took a deep breath. “You hurt me all the time, Bran. What makes this so special?” she asked, more curious than angry.

Bran tilted his head to the side, considering. “I don’t know.”

She snorted. A complicit acknowledgement that he did hurt her all the time and knew it. “I really should leave you,” she said.

A flare of alarm ran down the mate bond. “I didn’t mean that,” she said hurriedly. 

“Yes, you did,” he replied. He rubbed a hand over his chest. “Will you come back to bed? To sleep? Or would you prefer I slept in my room?”

“You can stay here. But I don’t want–“

“Yes, you’ve mentioned,” he said drily, sounding more like his old self.

With her chin up, Leah walked back to the bed. He made room for her but didn’t scoot all the way back onto his own side. When she tucked her way under the covers, her back to him, he was behind her. “Is this okay?” he asked, putting an arm about her waist.

She stared across the room. She wasn’t a complete idiot; she wasn’t going to reject affection that was offered. “That’s fine.”

They lay, silently together. She could feel him thinking and for the first time had the satisfaction of knowing that it was about her. 

“The girl,” Bran began, “The girl looks a little bit like you, I think.”

Leah nodded. He was stubborn. He wasn’t going to let it go. “Alice. She really looks like Alice.”

Bran tightened his arm around her. Leah realised she had only told Anna about Alice, which meant her daughter-in-law had tattled on her. She felt her lip curl. Bran made a soothing noise against her scalp. “She was concerned about you,” he said.

“She has no need to be.” Little werewolves should _mind their own business_.

“Let’s agree to disagree.”

Why did he always like them more than her? Anna and Mercy and Kara and Sage, _even Sage_ , and she had been a traitor. “We have never _agreed_ to disagree on _anything_.”

He laughed, or at least, shook with something that sounded like laughter. “That’s right.”

She hadn’t meant to be funny but she liked making him laugh. She was finding these swings of emotion quite challenging. Maybe they should just have sex. She understood how sex worked, how it fitted, and the panic was gone now. She could do it. 

She rolled over in his arms and kissed him. He kissed back but then, after a minute, put his hands around her face and pulled back. “We can do this,” he whispered, mouth close to hers, “I will never say no to this. But equally we don’t have to. It’s your choice.”

Leah felt raw inside, like she had been scraped all over with a metal comb. She knew she would derive comfort from Bran, from feeling him on top of her, inside of her. Then she thought of him leaving before she woke in the morning and thought, maybe…

“Okay,” she said. She made a move to turn back again but he held her still, arranged her so she was lying on him, her head on his chest and his arms around her. His breathing was slow and steady, his heart thumping under her ear.

She closed her eyes. _Don’t get used to this_ , she told herself, squashing her hope even as she relished every second. _Don’t_.

*

Leah did not like October because no one in their right mind would enjoy watching their husband swing from high to low with every hour that passed. One moment he was ecstatic, excited about the prospect of bringing others into their dwindling population, of bringing hope and new life to failing human bodies. The next he was crushingly low and silent – most wouldn’t survive and they would die at his teeth, at his claws. He felt every death as if it were a child of his body. He mourned them before it had even happened and then mourned them after.

Two weeks before the full moon, she watched her husband covered in blood and gore, edging close to madness, and _prayed._ Prayed for his sake that the humans that surrounded him would take the Change. She couldn’t give a damn about them. She only cared about him.

She closed her eyes and when she opened them again, six still lived, only one had died.

Now, in the months that followed, Anna would help. Since Anna had joined the pack, the survival rate of the werewolves Bran Changed had increased significantly. For that, Leah tolerated her. When Anna was at her most painfully _trying_ Leah thought of this and thought of the help she gave her mate and she could tolerate her for that alone. Or tried to, at least.

Bran tipped back his head and howled, howled to celebrate the six who had survived, howled to mourn the one who had not. The assembled pack, those who could withstand the bloody ceremony, followed suit, Leah joining them. 

Two weeks later, an exhausting two weeks spent daily with the newly Changed, daily in the company of Anna, they went for the Full Moon run, the true celebration of those who had made it. Full moon was always a time of heightened emotions but October full moon had the biggest pull. Leah had both broken up and started fights herself on full moon. The other females had learnt to keep well away from her, for they were often the target of her ire. They kept away from Bran, too – not for his sake, but for hers.

Bran who, when they were nearly home, Changed and forced her Change upon her, falling back from the pack. Who pinned her to the cold, hard forest ground and bit her neck, licked the wound and then bit her again on the meat of her shoulder whilst his hands roved over her body.

She lay passive, head tilted to the side, waiting for him to come back to himself a little, but arching into his hands still the same. Leah loved it when he was wild like this - but equally she wasn’t suicidal.

When he did come back to her, when his eyes were clearer, he kissed her, pushing his tongue into her mouth and using his thumbs to guide her mouth where he wanted it. She wrapped her arms around him, wrapped her legs around him, welcoming him to her body. 

At full moon, the wolf was closer to the surface than Bran would normally ever allow. She saw him there, a glint of amber-gold in Bran’s forest eyes. She saw him in the teeth he bared as he moved inside her. She saw him, finally, when Bran was braced over her, panting, and his eyes flashed solid gold for a moment. “ _Mine_ ,” the wolf told her, thickly.

Then Bran returned again and shook his head. He blinked and looked down at her suspiciously. “Did he say something?”

She could have lied. “Get off me, I’m lying on something sharp,” she said, instead, wincing.

He hurried to pull her up. Countless full moons, countless years and he always looked a little ashamed to have been caught in the moment, like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. She snorted. “Don’t. I enjoy it,” she said, for once moved to reassure him. “You _know_ I enjoy it.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness out and then hid it by jumping at him.

He caught her and smiled, hoisting her up. “You would fight me if you didn’t,” he agreed, kissing her thoroughly.

“I would.” She bit his bottom lip. “I would enjoy that too.”

*

Occasionally on a Saturday, Leah would volunteer at the Centre in Helena – say, twice a year. There were a few human women who did it, women who had either experienced domestic violence themselves or women who felt sympathy for the cause. Because Leah didn’t necessarily like being ‘known’, for the most part she kept her involvement to donations but there were occasions when she felt obliged to be more engaged. 

The work was nothing more complex than sorting the donations room, sometimes some gardening or even cleaning. As a rule, she preferred the gardening and Margaret usually set her that task when she was there. Often the clothes donated hadn’t been washed and stunk of the humans who had worn them, which she found personally repellent, and if she cleaned, it was usually in close proximity to someone else who liked to chat. Leah did not like to chat and made that clear.

So she did some weeding and was as polite as she could manage – most of the volunteers were older, in the fifties and sixties, and they reminded her of the spinster aunts who had flocked around her as a child. They were curious about her, sometimes nosily so. She was forced to make up small snippets of her life, even had a vague story about an abusive father to justify her presence.

“You’re very confident for such a young thing,” one of the women said, not critically. She had piercing blue eyes with deep laughter lines and a small scar on her chin. “Where are your people from?”

“Nebraska,” she said, bluntly.

She drove back in the dark, having picked up a platter of sushi for her dinner. Bran had gone away for the weekend, part of the reason she had volunteered, and whilst she had been gardening she had made plans for her evening’s entertainment and had mentally lined up a movie to watch.

At home, she set about making the house feel more welcoming, having been left empty and cold all day. She lit the fire and piled the cushions and blankets into the corner of the couch, arranging the sushi on the coffee table so she could snack whilst she watched. Leah’s choice of films fell into two categories – violence or romantic comedies. Tonight’s film was the former. By the twenty-third minute, forty-two people had already died. She was enjoying herself _immensely_.

She was fully involved in a car chase, twirling her chopsticks, when she felt the first prickle of unease.

Leah muted the television so she could devote her senses to the feeling.

She was being watched.

A good predator’s reaction to being watched was not panic. It was a calm assessment of her surroundings. Her nose told her there was no one in the house except her. She had locked the doors and windows. She began to draw a trickle of power through the pack bonds, nothing that would raise alarm, but enough that she could Change more quickly or fight back with more power in her human body. Slowly, she turned her head to the right, where the glass doors onto the decking looked out into the forest and the mountains.

A monster stood, watching her. It was over eight feet, mottled grey, and stood like a quadruped did if it stood on its hind legs. It had thick, corded thighs and distorted, muscled arms with long, tapered fingers. It had a muzzle and its eyes glowed.

Leah dropped the trickle approach and started to suck power towards her rapidly. At the same moment the monster drew back and punched its way through the glass doors, tearing the frame and shattering bullet proof glazing with its hands as if it was spun sugar.

She ran.

Through the living room, down the hall, past Bran’s office, hitting the inner door to the garage. She slammed the reinforced metal door closed behind her and at the same time punched the button beside it, activating the panic room setting. As the secondary door dropped, she heard the monster hit the first door a millisecond later – and it held.

There was no truck in the garage – hers was parked out front, which was a mistake, and Bran had his, wherever he was. She crouched on the floor and started her Change, shredding her clothes as she shed her human body, feeling the monster bash against the doors through the vibrations in the floor and the _whomp, whomp, whomp_ as he struck the metal. Dents began to appear in the door.

If she was lucky, Charles and the others would be coming to her aid, alerted by her screaming need through the pack bonds. Otherwise, she had only herself to rely upon. She was strong, stronger with Bran’s power, but judging from the short work the monster was making of the door, he was stronger still. 

The controls to the garage door were at both human height and wolf height. She hit her head against the button to raise the doors and almost immediately the impact against the entrance from the house began to grow more violent. Plaster started to puff from the door-frame as the walls began to give before the metal of the doors did.

She flattened herself to the ground as far away from the inner door as she could but nose pressed to the opening garage door. It inched open, excruciatingly slowly. Behind her, she heard the first door go and then the monster started on the second.

Leah pressed her jaw between the concrete floor and the gap that was emerging, pushing until her head popped through and she scrabbled forward, leaving her hind quarters vulnerably exposed, her hind paws scraping behind her. She popped through, legs already going, running before she was fully free.

She headed straight for the forest. She needed to keep the monster on her tail, keep it away from the town proper but equally away from the direction of the Wildlings. Without Bran, Charles was her best bet for support and if he was on his way to her, he would be in wolf form. If she travelled directly, she would meet him.

Almost as the thought crossed her mind, she heard his howl. She felt a swell of overpowering relief and – yes – affection for her step-son, whose duty to the pack never abated and who would help her even if he would rather she had never entered his father’s life.

Behind her, the monster chased. He wasn’t as fast but he was moving quickly, crashing through trees and shrubbery, paws heavy on the ground.

She all but collided with the large red body of Charles and, behind him, Anna. She yipped, excitedly, and then nosed Anna so that she moved behind the stronger presence of her husband, taking her muzzle between her jaw when Anna resisted. Anna had grown in confidence and skill since she had moved to Aspen Creek but she was not a natural born killer and she was Omega. To Leah’s mind, there was no place for her in a fight. _Obey_ , she told her, forcing Anna back.

From the west came another, Tag, racing through the trees at a dead run. He skidded to a halt in front of her and bowed his head.

Tag was good. Tag was _strong_.

She spun around and, together, they faced oncoming creature.

*

The fight was bloody, and long. Or perhaps it just felt that way. They took turns attacking, weakening the creature. Leah lost how many times she was flung through the air, crashing against trunks of trees and into bushes. It snapped at her legs, her flank, her face and when it held on, it _crushed_ with such force that she whimpered in agony.

It was weakening. As a team, they attacked the spots that were weakest on an animal – the eyes, the throat, the belly. They circled it, allowing one to suffer the brunt of its attention whilst the others savaged it.

_It wasn’t enough._

Whilst it was occupied with Charles, Leah climbed its back and clamped her jaws down on its neck, savaging the flesh, feeling it split between her fangs. It roared, throwing back its head and shaking her, violently. Charles dove for its stomach, using his claws to tear and rend and then reached up to snap at its throat. It roared again and, with enormous strength, flung itself to the side, throwing both Charles and Leah far into the trees. Charles struck a fir – she heard the crack of something breaking – and Leah herself skidded across the trees to hit her spine on the low-hanging branches of a juniper.

Tag and Anna took their turn, her small daughter-in-law nimbly scuttling between its legs, tripping him, biting at its ankles and generally being an incredible distraction as the bigger Tag went for its soft parts.

The monster rose up on its hind quarters and swiped at Tag with its massive paws, clawing his face and sending him flipping backwards. At that moment, its vulnerable chest was exposed and gunshot ricochet through the forest – once, twice, three times. Reflexively, the werewolves dove to the ground, all except the monster, whose body literally exploded before their eyes.

Asil emerged from the bushes, carrying his shotgun and wearing pyjamas. This strange vision threw her completely - _Asil wears pyjamas?_ He walked up to the monster, lying on the ground, aimed at its head, and fired another slug into its brain.

“That should do it,” he said, thoughtfully. He looked around. “Though we should really sever its head. I don’t suppose any of you have a knife?”

*

In the end, Charles Changed and took control, as he was wont to do. Unusually, he was polite and deferential about it. He sent Asil back to get a knife, so they could divest the monster of his head.   
  
“Would you go back to the main house to take a call?” he said to her, squinting as he looked her over. “Da is worried.”

Leah chose to believe Bran was worried about _her_ , rather than the more general implied worry. She took her battered and beaten body back in the direction of the house, not able to run but managing something like a trot except when she took a small break or two to lean against a tree. She didn’t think her injuries were serious – outside of the weeping wounds where the monster had torn chunks of flesh, she probably had some broken ribs, and there was something wrong with her front left leg that would bear some investigation. To speak to Bran she would need to Change but once she did, she knew she would collapse.

She stepped through the broken French doors, snapped the phone from the side table between her jaws and made her way, limping, up the stairs to her bedroom.

She contemplated her bed – inexplicably high – and decided it was a step too far and she was too woozy to try to attempt it.

She attempted to start her Change but her body resisted. After a moment, a trickle of warmth from the pack bonds made itself known. _Bran_ , she thought. Her vision greyed at the edges. _So tired._

With Bran’s power behind her, she started her Change. It was excruciatingly slow and seemed to go on for hours. She heard herself whimpering, whimpers becoming cries, then tears of pain. Afterwards, human, naked, she lay on the rug and tried to overcome the nausea.

The phone rung.

If she hadn’t known it was him, she would have ignored it. She stabbed at the speaker button. “’lo?” she managed.

“Leah.”

She sighed at his voice. It was impossibly reassuring. “Come home?” she said. He sounded like he was in a car.

“Two hours.”

“Okay.” She rubbed her sore face against the rug. “It’s dead. We survived.” She thought about it. “Not the windows though.” They had been _so expensive_ to install. Ugh. She hated waste.

“Do you know what it was?”

“Monster.”

“Yes, you made that clear.”

She didn’t remember doing that. Sometimes Bran let things slip through the bond, though. Perhaps he'd taken a peek. Slowly, she pushed herself onto all fours and then managed a sort of deliberate fall so that she was propped up against the divan. She grunted. Two, maybe three broken ribs. Something on her head…? “Anna did well,” she said, the spontaneous thought popping into her mind and running out of her mouth.

“She did?”

“Used her strengths. Very good.” The wound on her leg was… gory. She probably needed medical attention. Wounds that would kill a human always needed medical attention and this one was… bleeding a lot. A wave of dizziness overcame her, along with the sudden urge to be sick. Hmm.

“What’s happening with the body?”

“Head. Off.” She poked at the hole in her leg, as ever, curious to see inside her own body. It hurt.

“How bad are you hurt?” Bran said, suddenly, and his voice seemed to ring in her ear. 

Leah dropped the phone and slid sideways to the floor. “Lotta bone.” She tried closing one eye to see if it would help with the dizziness. It did not. This was not a good sign. She pressed the off button and hit speed dial. Whoever answered the phone at the other end didn’t speak first, which was fine. “Main house,” she managed. Then she allowed herself to pass out.

*

Leah woke with the taste of a sedative in her mouth.

“Blech,” she said to her pillow.

“I know, I know,” Bran murmured. “There’s juice on the table.”

“You’re here,” she sighed, rolling onto her back with superhuman effort. She didn’t recall him coming home. She didn’t recall much of anything, come to think of it. Her thigh throbbed, reminding her that there had been a fairly sizeable hole in her leg. The ribs felt better, though, so that was something.

“I am indeed.”

Bran was sitting up in her bed, working on his laptop. He never usually brought work into the bedroom. He was also fully dressed.

“What time is it?” she asked, easing herself up onto the pillow and reaching for the promised juice. It was cloudy apple; her favorite. She took a big gulp, trying to rid herself of the terrible taste of chemicals.

“Nearly 4pm.”

She thought some more. If she had slept that long, it probably meant she had been more damaged than she thought. “Who else was hurt?”

“You were the worst, in the sense that you nearly died,” Bran said, calmly clicking away on his laptop. “But Tag has a broken arm.”

Four werewolves hadn’t been able to take him. It it hadn’t been for Asil, she suspected they wouldn’t have survived. She shuddered. “Did you go see it?”

“No, I have been otherwise occupied.”

She glanced at the laptop and assumed something else was going on. She sniffed the air. At some point in the night she’d had a fever and the sweat had dried on her skin, ingrained in the set of pyjamas that she had never seen in her life. Where had they found them? “I need to shower.”

“You will need to try to keep that bandage dry.”

She nodded and swivelled her legs over the side of the bed. After bracing herself – this would hurt – she slowly stood upright. She wobbled and grabbed onto the newel post at the end of the bed. She felt weak as a new-born pup. The pain in her leg was familiar, a bone deep ache. Her head hurt, too.

It had been a while since she’d felt this bad.

“Would you like me to help you?” Bran asked, sounding coolly disinterested.

Leah contemplated the walk to the bathroom and then thought about the implicit weakness of accepting his offer. Everything was a test to Bran.

“I can do it,” she said, firmly.

There was a rustle and then he was in front of her. His face was pinched; he was angry. She had failed the test.

Disappointed in herself, she forced herself to relax as he picked her up. She watched his profile. “Why are you so angry?” she wondered as he carried her into the bathroom.

“You can’t imagine?” He balanced her on the rim of the bath and turned on the shower, one hand on her shoulder to hold her upright. “I come home and the house is wide open to the world, my wife is being given mouth to mouth by a doctor in our bedroom, and my daughter-in-law is sobbing at her side.”

“Anna was crying?”

“Copiously.”

Leah was pleasantly surprised. “That’s nice,” she said. She bet Anna was responsible for the pyjamas, though.

“Nice?” Bran glared down at her. He started undoing the buttons of her ugly pyjamas. “Why on—why didn’t you stay with Charles?”

“I really didn’t know I was that badly hurt. What was it? I thought my ribs…?” She touched her ribcage, lightly as he peeled back the top. She winced because her back hurt. ”And the leg, of course.”

“Four broken ribs, one of which punctured a lung. You were _wheezing_ on the phone to me. There was extensive blood loss from the wound on your leg, deep claw marks in your lower back and blunt force trauma to your head.” Bran cupped a hand over the back of her skull which, now that he mentioned it, did ache quite a lot. “I’ve had words with my son.”

Leah couldn’t get over Anna weeping. And Bran, too, was unhappy she had been hurt. She felt warm and not just from the increasingly steamy bathroom. She smiled and then her thoughts stuttered to a halt, as always. Of course he cared if she lived or died. If she died, he’d snap.

Bran narrowed his eyes at her. “Can you focus, please?”

“Stop yelling at me – I was recently very badly hurt,” she said, pouting up at him. She lifted her arms. “Will you help me into the shower?”

He stripped off his clothes, a sight that gave her great pleasure, and then set about peeling her pyjama pants off. Watching a man kneeling at her feet was also a delight. It was just a shame she was physically incapable of doing anything about it.

“Where did Anna find the pyjamas?” she asked. There were _snowmen_ on them. “They’re vile.”

“In one of your drawers. I think they were a Christmas present.”

“From someone who doesn’t know me very well,” she muttered. Probably Mercy – a gift designed to annoy, her speciality. “They’re going _straight_ into the donations pile.”

Bran smiled and then his smile was very close to her face. He kissed her, just a brush over her lips. “I like them. You should keep them.”

Of course he’d like them. “Absolutely _not_.”

After the sadly perfunctory shower, he tucked her back into bed, minus the pyjamas, then re-settled himself beside her with his laptop.

She watched him for a little while, then dozed for a few minutes before jerking awake to check that he was still there. She repeated this exercise, each time going a little deeper, only to wake up more sharply, worried that he would be gone.

“Go to sleep,” he eventually told her, sternly. “Tomorrow we’re going monster-hunting.”

*

She felt better in the morning, felt even better when Bran went down on her with no expectation of any reciprocation of any kind. She floated on her orgasm for several minutes before he chivvied her into the shower again. He wasn’t often that gentle; it was a novelty.

She dried and dressed in comfortable clothes and joined him and the others downstairs, pouring over a map in the dining room. She pulled a face, as the map would be all-but meaningless to her, and took her position beside Bran. 

Charles was showing the areas where he had scented the monster. There were thin, hand drawn lines, looping around. She gathered from the conversation that the monster had been scouting Aspen Creek as a whole and they were discussing if there was a noticeable pattern.

She tried to focus on the map. It was a topographical one – the worst kind - which showed all the details of the landscape, with all the lines and tiny words, little symbols and numbers. If she looked at the bigger picture, she could make out the mountain range based on the colour and the few bodies of water. The red lines Charles had drawn were around Aspen Creek, she guessed. It didn’t help that the map was upside down, so North and South were the wrong way.

“It’s odd that it went up here so frequently,” Charles was saying, pointing to an area. The red lines had two loops that did seem out of place.

Bran ‘hmmmed’. “There are a few houses. Leah, don’t we have a property there?”

Leah had no idea where ‘there’ was. “We have lots of properties,” she said, stalling for time. Asil made a noise of annoyance and she grit her teeth.

“But specifically here? This is one we own.” Bran tapped his fingers against the table. “Andrea stayed here, didn’t she?”

The submissive. The rental. “Oh yes. I’ve been there a lot recently. We’re re-decorating.”

Charles ran his finger across two, thin loops that were either side of a blue line – the river. Then, with lowered eyes, he peeled a small orange circle from a piece of paper and stuck it on a spot at the end of one of the loops. “And here? Do you use this route? Where I have placed the dot is this house.”

Since she knew that was the river, and that was the house, she could picture it. “It’s my running route,” she said. She paused. “I have another one. It goes up behind the town, then loops around Tag’s house.” It was shorter but less flat. She used it when she had less time.

Slowly, Charles traced another red line. “Here,” he said. 

Bran drew himself back from where he had been leaning over the map. “The pattern makes more sense if we assume it was tracking Leah. Is there anywhere else you’ve been more frequently than usual in town in the last week?”

She lifted and dropped a shoulder. “Lots of places. Kara’s. Asil’s. The cabins where the new wolves are. I usually drive, though.”

Charles tapped the locations on the map. “It’s been there, but not concentrated. All the scents are reasonably fresh, a couple of weeks, no older than that.” He looked to Asil, who nodded his confirmation. “The most recent are around the house, the areas where Leah would have been on foot.”

Bran thought. “There was nothing around full moon. We went on a run and crossed several of these. We would have noticed. The scent is very particular.”

“Is this all the places you’ve scented it?” Leah asked. They had been busy, whilst she had been unconscious, but she could see no red line entering Aspen Creek. Had it just manifested? Summoned, perhaps?

That she had been the target, apparently, wasn’t unduly concerning to her. She was the Marrok’s mate; it wasn’t the first time she had been seen as a weak link. A few decades ago, Chastel had sent a series of psychopaths to bother them. She had dispatched each one, personally, and enjoyed coming up with creative ways to return them to the sick son of a bitch. That sort of thing wouldn’t be possible now.

“Before I retired for the night, I tracked it further this way.” Asil leaned over the map to point. Leah used the reference point of her house, the river and her running route to work out where it was. It just took the trail more deeply into the mountains. “Let’s link two curiosities, shall we, as an experiment. Four weeks ago, a landslide revealed the site of many horrors related to our dear Leah’s past,” Asil said smoothly, taking one of Charles’s little stickers and placing it on the map. “And now we have a monster stalking her through our town, who waited until she was alone, at night, to attack her in her house.”

Leah stared at where he had placed the sticker for the cave. If the monster had taken a direct route the way Asil was suggesting, it would lead straight up to where the cave was located. With dawning resentment, she realised her least favorite subject matter was about to be brought up again.

Honestly, she would rather talk about _Mercy_ at this point. 

“It’s a big coincidence,” Bran said, not looking at her.

“Perhaps there had been something trapped in the cave,” Charles mused. “The landslide could have released it. There’s magic in death, particularly violent death. We could be looking at some kind of spirit, something that could manifest when the circumstances were right. My concern is that the spirit might remain, though we destroyed this monster. Vengeful spirits tend to repeat.”

Everyone was looking at her now. Waiting. 

It was Anna, who spoke first, when Leah didn’t, her eyes round with sympathy but lowered. “Leah, we know it was a long time ago and isn’t something you wish to speak of, but if there is anything you remember?”

“Anything ritualistic about what he was doing?” Charles voice was no-nonsense, which she liked. “Any prayers? Any sense of sacrifice for a purpose?”

Leah sighed and rubbed her hands over her face, as if she could erase herself from this conversation. “If there was anyone praying it was me. I prayed to God that He would save me. Then I just wanted Him to end me.” She snorted – she had been a terrible Christian, going to Church because it was expected, but when it had come to her end, she had never been more devout. “I thought he was the devil, brought to earth.”

There had been a woman, still alive, when he had dragged Leah and an unconscious Alice to the cave. She had called him that. _Devil_. _Lucifer_. _Satan_.

He had kept a small fire burning, at the mouth of the cave. It had filled the room with smoke. Her eyesight hadn’t been very good – early on, he had hit her, broken something in her face that had swollen her eyes partially shut. The only time she had seen him properly had been when he was above her, sour-hot breath on her face.

She pushed that thought away. _Not helpful._

“I wasn’t conscious a great deal.” She had tried to be, though. She had tried crawling, when Alice had died. Screamed and clawed at him with her puny human fingers. He had flung her from him, hard, across the cave. She had crumpled against the wall and lost consciousness again. “I watched him eat her.”

Anna gagged and pressed her face into Charles shoulder. “Oh God, that’s so awful.”

“Was he trying to Change the women?” her husband asked her quietly. She noticed he was standing closer, now, his body deceptively relaxed. Was he trying to be supportive? Did he expect her to break down?

“I don’t think so. Mostly he just wanted the other thing.” She touched her neck, considering. She smelt his breath, then. His noises of rotten pleasure. “He tore out my throat. _That_ was how I died.”

Anna flinched.

“And then?”

“I woke angry. I felt _powerful_. But he was, still.” She swallowed and gestured vaguely, aware that there was another victim of sexual abuse in the room and Anna’s damage was more recent. “I grabbed a rock and hit him until he stopped moving and then I ran.” She had left Alice there, with him. She had always regretted that.

“Someone must have deliberately blocked the entrance,” Asil said.

“Oh. St. John did that.”

“Really,” Bran said and his voice was noticeably cool. “How much did St. John know?”

“All of it.” Leah scratched her thumbnail on the table. She pouted. “I imagined he didn’t tell you in case it tarnished my appeal.”

“I’m more interested in what he knew of another Alpha slaughtering human women in the territory, Leah.”

She drew back at his tone. “Well, I don’t know. He wasn’t exactly _chatty_.” St. John had been a hard-nosed son-of-a-bitch, though she had grown fond of him in the handful of years that she had been part of his pack. He had raised her, in the werewolf sense. His mate had taught her to fight dirty and kill quickly and almost everything she knew about being a female werewolf. About pack and hierarchy and what it meant to be mated to an Alpha.

When Bran had approached him about the territory, St. John had almost thrown it at him, claiming the area was getting too ‘busy’. She had later – when she had become Bran’s mate – realised that St. John had seen in Bran someone who outmatched him. He had been practical, that way. America had been impossibly big, back then, and there were few werewolves. If Bran had wanted this part of it, so be it, he wasn’t going to die over it.

He had driven a hard bargain over Leah, however. 

“You can ask him, I suppose. He’s in Mexico City now,” she said, feeling devilish.

Since they'd had the landline phone installed, once every year she would get a call. _Leah?_ he’d yell down the phone. _How’s the King of the Wolves treating you?_

It always made her laugh.

“How nice that you’re still in touch,” Bran said, smiling, all friendly. “Do you speak often?”

Alpha males didn’t ring other Alpha’s mates. That wasn’t done. “Often enough to know where he is.”

Bran’s humor failed and he bared his teeth and turned to look at Charles sharply. “I think we have enough information from my wife, now.”

“It’s a start,” Charles said. He bowed his head to Leah. “Thank you for sharing.”

*

They tracked the scent to the cave, to no one’s surprise. Charles Changed as the other wolves scented the area.

“He must have come out after full moon,” Charles said to Bran as Bran stood at the entrance to the cave. 

Bran clearly said something to him because Charles nodded. “A death curse. Mercy told me.” Charles glanced to Leah. “I don’t suppose you’re secretly a witch?”

Leah gave him a scornful look. Bran snorted.

She sat on her haunches outside the mouth of the cave next to Bran and looked in. A few weeks of aeration and the cave no longer smelt so pungently of death and despair. There was still not a chance in hell she was going in there.

Bran licked her face. _Stay here_ , he told her. He, Charles, Asil and Anna trotted inside. Anna looked back to give Leah a distinctly goofy look, which she didn’t know how to interpret, and then followed her husband.

Sighing, Leah went to lie down, looking over the ledge at the view from the cave. It was beautiful here. She had always thought so.

“Pretty guuuurl.”

Leah leaped in the air, almost falling over the ledge as she scuttled away from the sound. At the sight of the ghostly figure, she yipped loudly for the others.

The monster had been one thing, she discovered. The _man_ – even a translucent figure of one – was another. She trembled in terror even as she braced herself to fight and growled. 

He was, she supposed, as she had seen him last. He was six feet, corded with muscle but lean, as if regular meals were a thing of the past. His hair was matted and long, no discernable colour except for that of ingrained dirt. His face was thickly bearded and his eyes were dark pools of madness.

With a bark, Bran skidded between them, followed by Asil. They both hunched low, growling.

As Leah watched, the spirit became less translucent. Horrifyingly, he began to transform into the monster from the other night and as he did, he became a solid creature, his wolf-like features emerging growing into a monstrously large figure. A monster she, Charles, Tag and Anna had struggled to kill without intervention from man’s greatest weapon.

“Leah, go,” Charles called, at the mouth of the cave as he started his transformation. “It’s you he wants. _Run_.”

 _Go!_ Bran ordered, when she hesitated.

She went.

Running away wasn’t a difficult task. Healed, with adrenaline coursing through her body, she took the route she knew was risky – as it placed them near one of the Wildlings homes – but expedient. This time she needed to be where there were guns and people willing to use them. Tag was a safe bet, provided Bran didn’t summon him. If not and she was able to get a good enough head start, she could Change and break into Tag’s home herself. She knew where he kept his weapons.

*

Tag was home and he was waiting for her, armed to the teeth and packing a heavy duty first aid kit into the back of his truck. She chuffed at the sight of him and went to Change in his front room. He tossed her a spare set of sweats – his size – and she pulled them on, rolling up the sleeves and pants and pulling on the drawstring so she was sure she wasn’t going to flash anyone. She felt like a child dressing up.

“Same thing?” he asked, when she re-joined him, climbing into his truck.

She nodded. “It’s a vengeful spirit from the cave. Apparently it doesn't like to stay dead,” she said.

“Rough,” Tag surmised.

She agreed.

They both felt the draw of the pack bonds almost as soon as they left the town proper and made the frustratingly circular journey to where they would need to hike up. Leah looked at her bare feet thoughtfully.

“Some spare boots in the back,” he said. “Something should fit.”

Rather than wait until they reached their destination, Leah climbed into the back then and there. It was a mess – empty snack wrappers, fishing gear, a couple of battered tool boxes. Several pairs of shoes of different sizes, including some sandals that could only fit Kara. She shook her head. She found the left boot of something that looked like it might fit and then rummaged around trying to find a second, all as the track got bumpier and bumpier. At one point, Tag hit a dip that shot her up, colliding her head with the roof. “Watch it,” she growled.

She found the other boot and pulled it on, lacing it quickly before climbing back into the passenger seat. The draw on the bonds was growing stronger, nothing compared to the other night which Leah decided to take positively.

They pulled up at the base of the climb and threw open the doors. Tag grabbed the first aid kit and handed her a rifle, before slinging another over his shoulder and picking up the cumbersome first aid kit. Leah could hear the action above them, the violent sounds of animals meeting each other in battle. Ripping and tearing and yips of pain.

They ran.

Twenty yards from the ledge, Tag put down the first aid kit and they crawled the rest of the way up, readying themselves into a position to fire, keeping quiet and close to the ground.

She found a small gap between two boulders and peeked through it. The monster was still standing and as she watched, it hurled Charles across and into the mouth of the cage. A small, dark wolf - Anna - was down, which left Charles, Asil and Bran.

When Bran fought in his wolf form, it was like a dance. He was small for a werewolf and, like Anna, that made him fast and nimble. He read the body language of other predators faster than anyone she had ever met, in both wolf and human form, predicting their moves before they had even committed to them. Each time he attacked, he did so precisely and with such a punch of power that the monster clearly felt it in its bones as it stumbled back from him. 

Asil and Charles were all right, too, Leah thought as an afterthought. 

As she lined up her shot, she realised the biggest problem was that they were moving too fast. She was hard pressed to get a good shot and worried she might accidentally hurt Bran or one of the others.

They were downwind. Tag leaned close to her and whispered, “It wants you, Bran says. Stand up.”

In one smooth motion, Leah rose, rifle raised. Glimpsing her out of the corner of its eye, the monster span on its hind paws and roared, spittle flying. She fired – once, twice, three times – and blew its chest clean through. Tag followed up with a shot to its head.

It dropped, backwards, down onto the ground. Bran trotted forward and ripped out its throat.

*

This time they burnt the body and, whilst Leah kept watch over it and a recovering Anna, the others cleansed the cave to Charles’s exacting specifications, burning bundles of sage whilst Bran’s son wandered around muttering to himself. Even Leah, who wasn’t ultimately very sensitive to the more mystical magics, could feel the air clearing, becoming lighter, purer. She could breathe more easily.

Then, as a final measure, they rolled rocks and boulders into the entrance and blocked it up.

By the time the ash from the monster’s body had cooled, Tag had returned from his expedition to and from his house – bringing with him a large metal bucket and brushes. They mixed the ashes with silver-flakes and cement powder and carried it back down the mountain.

At the base of the mountain, Peggy was waiting with her truck so they could split the dominants up on the return journey.

A quick calculation had Bran, driving Tag’s truck, with Asil in the front seat and Leah in the back. Charles drove Peggy’s truck with Tag in the front and Peggy and Anna in the back. 

Leah curled up in her corner and closed her eyes.

With unspoken agreement, they all returned to the main house. Leah shuffled into the kitchen to boil water and milk for hot drinks and to defrost something to feed the group. She was leaning on the kitchen counter, rubbing her face with her hands, recognising that she had no real justification to feel this tired, when Bran came in to help. She intently watched him put mugs on a tray, noting the slow way he was moving, the peek of the bandages she had applied herself, reassuring herself that he was alive. 

As if mirroring her thoughts, Bran ran his hand down the back of her head and then gripped her hair, tugging her up lightly. She lifted her head and he leaned forward and kissed her, once. It was a hard kiss. Then he leaned their foreheads together. “I’ll finish in here. For my sanity, please can you go and change out of Tag’s clothes?” he asked softly and the hairs on the back of her arms lifted at his tone. 

She winced and nodded. It was the sort of thing that only bothered him when he was tired. “I can do that.”

He reached behind her and stroked her backside. “Thank you.” 

“Though,” Leah said, reasonably confident that their low voices wouldn’t be heard over the sound of the microwave and the others might not hear if he rejected her, “you could always come with me and take them off yourself?”

Bran slow smile was answer enough. 

*

It wasn’t over, of course. Bran ordered a watch put on the house and set up scouts to track the scents around the town. Leah found herself with a daily shadow every time she left the house – a rotating irritant of Anna, Peggy, Tag or, if she was especially lucky, Asil. 

She tolerated this for a week. Then she put her foot down and went to complain

Bran rejected this out of hand. “I want another full moon and then I’ll review,” he said, not looking away from his laptop.

“Bran, really. It’s unnecessary. The danger has gone.”

He glanced at her, eyebrows raised. “Are you really complaining that I’m concerned for your welfare?”

She scowled and walked out of his study. ‘Concerned’, her ass.

She drove to Billings with Anna to do some shopping and marched her stunned daughter-in-law around Rimrock with military efficiency. She replaced their stash of ‘disposables’ with cheap sets of sweats from H&M and then grabbed a bunch of T-shirts from the men’s section for Bran. They always had some quirky designs that he liked – retro band shirts, things with slogans. The sort of thing a young man would wear and blend in.

“What about this?” Anna said, holding up a T-shirt.

It was white with a black silhouette of a wolf howling. “Perfect,” Leah said, smiling. He would love it. It was the sort of on-the-nose humor he really appreciated. “Get four.”

“I want one,” Anna said, rifling through the rack and pulling out sizes. “I can wear it to bed.”

Leah paid and then she allowed Anna to get a Starbucks before they went into J C Penney to look at bed-sheets. The destruction of bedding from bloodshed or enthusiasm was a constant struggle. She found some navy sheets that looked hardy and picked up two sets and then swung by kitchenware for new wine glasses for the rental, which was nearly finished.

They went to a sports shop to get the socks Bran liked and Anna tried on a pair of luminous sneakers that caught her eye. The shop assistant flirted with them both, which flustered Anna and amused Leah. She convinced him to give them his friends and family discount and considered it a successful exchange.

Finally, they stopped to get their nails done, because it was the sort of thing a person did with their daughter-in-law, Leah decided.

On the drive home, Anna was quiet, the kind of quiet that builds up to something.

“I have a question to ask.”

“You shock me.”

The corner of Anna’s mouth quirked. “Do you have problems with reading?”

Leah was surprised and then angry. “No, I don’t have problems _reading_.”

But it was a lie.

“I watched you this week and you went out of your way to avoid reading stuff. The contracts the agent had you sign, the list Bran left for that thing. It made you cross. You _hate_ maps, which isn’t unusual, loads of people do, but you don’t have a problem if someone tells you directions. You like magazines but I think you just look at the pictures, not the articles. Charles told me once that you hate reading books but then all the way up here we listened to that book on tape. It’s the reading you hate, isn’t it?”

Leah contemplated the road. Truthfully, the book on tape had been a tactic to keep Anna from talking to her. She did listen to them, when she had the time. She had even tried to get the ones of the kind of books that Bran liked to read – he was pretty eclectic - but there were only so many occasions she could _listen_ to a book and even when she did, it was in brief snatches. It was hard to get into something when there were thirty minutes in a week to listen and she had to re-start each time.

“The words swim on the page,” she said, eventually. “It’s sometimes difficult.”

“Have you ever been tested for dyslexia?”

Another thing she didn’t know; great. “I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a learning disorder. Your brain can’t interpret words, letters and symbols. It’s usually diagnosed quite early on in children but if it wasn’t around when you were a child, then of course you wouldn’t have been. It doesn’t have any reflection on intelligence. It’s just a problem your brain has.”

Leah stared ahead, silently. Having something wrong with her brain didn’t sound like the sort of thing a strong mate would allow. And yet…

Anna took out her phone and started tapping. “There’s loads of thing you can do to improve it. Does Bran know?”

“I doubt he’s even heard of it.”

“No, about the reading.”

“I think he just thinks I’m stupid, Anna,” Leah sighed. Bran was a voracious reader. She recalled his strange pleasure that she was so utterly disinterested in his favorite pastime - another thing to add to the list of _Reasons Why He Couldn't Like Her_.

“He doesn’t think you’re stupid,” Anna said, dismissively. Leah decided not to disagree. She had once heard Samuel _describe_ her as stupid to Bran, who hadn’t denied it. Hard to negate that fact.

Anna found what she was looking for and began to read out the symptoms of adult dyslexia. Despite herself, Leah was intrigued. It was extraordinary hearing some of her own thoughts, the description of her experiences, being read out loud by someone else. But she couldn't shake the idea of having an actual ‘disorder’. It gave her a bad taste in her mouth, made her feel even less _good enough._

“Okay, you can stop. I’m convinced.”

__

“You should get tested. It will help understand how severe it is.”

__

“I will think about it,” she said.

__

Anna seemed to recognise this was as good as it was going to get. She put her phone away and folded her hands.

__

Leah frowned. She wouldn’t even know where to begin with such a thing anyway. They had their own doctors – did she ask one of those? She imagined, with growing dislike, approaching one of them with her ‘problem’. It was too much. She couldn’t do it. 

__

“Don’t tell Bran,” Leah said. 

__

“I won’t.”

__

*

__

It was the night before full moon and Leah was in the kitchen. Everyone brought something to the full moon run to drive off the hunger from the Change and the run itself and food would be dropped off throughout the day. Leah herself usually provided a few bulk dishes – potatoes, salads, a couple of roasts – and she found that prepping them was a calming activity when the full moon got her blood up.

__

She had seen little of Bran in the last week, so was surprised when he sought her out in the kitchen and leaned against the kitchen island opposite her, where she was peeling potatoes. He was, she saw, wearing the T-shirt with the wolf on the front. It made her smile. 

__

“Tell me about the reading.”

__

Leah saw red and dropped everything she was doing, murder in her heart. “That little bitch—!” She was going to kill her, she was going to rip her arms from her puny little body.

__

“She didn’t tell me. She told Charles and told _him_ not to tell me. Charles told me because he felt it was something I should know. I understand Anna is now _also_ furious with him.”

__

Leah didn’t care. She shrieked with rage and stalked out of the room. She had split second decision between leaving the house and storming to her bedroom like a teenager and was forced to choose the latter. If she walked out of the house without one of her shadows, she would just be adding fuel to the fire.

__

She ran upstairs and closed the door to her bedroom, locked it, and then closed, and locked, the connecting door between their rooms. 

__

She paced.

__

At first, she could feel nothing but abject hatred. It was a litany in her head. _Hate, hate, hate, hate._ Hate everyone and everything. The stupid girl who broke her trust and her privacy and now Charles knew and Bran knew and both pitied her. Pitied her _more_. A weak mate who couldn’t read. How pathetic.

__

She picked up a cushion and screamed into it. This couldn’t be happening.

__

Bran unlocked her bedroom door and walked inside.

__

“Get out!” she screamed, throwing the cushion at him.

__

He deflected it with one hand and approached her. She backed up, quickly, and he started after her but managed to stop himself with a visible effort, pulling back from the instinct to chase her. He held his hands out. “No, we are going to discuss this like two adults who have been married a very long time. _Please_.”

“I don’t want—“

“Leah, that is not good enough. We cannot keep doing this. Please, listen to me, listen to the words I am using. I am _only_ asking this because I care that you get the help you need.”

He cared? Since when? Leah clenched her hands together. “ _She shouldn’t have told.”_

__

Bran sighed. “Perhaps not. I believe it came from a good place.”

__

She threw her hands up. “Oh, yes, let’s defend Anna. Let’s protect her from any repercussions. Just like always. Never mind that she violated _my_ trust, broke her promise to me. _It comes from a good place_ ,” she mimicked. “It was _not_ her place.”

__

“I agree.”

__

That stumped her. She felt herself deflating. “You do.”

__

“Yes. I don’t think Anna should have told Charles and I also think Charles is at fault. If he should have spoken to anyone, it should have been you. I will speak to her, if you want me to. And I will speak to Charles.”

__

She nodded. She could count on one hand the number of times Bran had ever been moved to speak on her behalf. “Okay.”

__

“But, at the heart of this, I think you should have told me.”

__

“I was going to!” she exclaimed, before realising her mistake.

__

“ _Lie_ ,” he spat, his temper flaring before he banked it. His eyes drifted half closed. “You didn’t tell me, just like you didn’t tell me about the monster in the cave. These are not secrets about other people, Leah. They are significant things about you that I should know, that you should feel you can tell me.”

__

She hated arguing with Bran. She could never win because he always had such control over his emotions and because it always felt like he walked into an argument with it already plotted out in his brain. That he knew what her responses would be and how to spin them to his advantage. She did not have the same control.

__

She had to be _careful_. She didn’t want to bring up the monster, they had covered it and changing a decision she had made before she had even known him properly wasn’t something she could do. The stupid reading thing, _that_ was now. “I didn’t know about the broken brain. I didn’t know that was something that happened to people.”

__

“You may not have known it was a diagnosable problem but you knew you had difficulty reading. Not that you ‘didn’t like it’. Not that you were ‘too busy’.” He parroted back words she had used to him before, a long time ago. “If I leave you written instructions, you often get them wrong and say it’s because my handwriting is hard to read. I’ve seen emails where you have completely misunderstood what someone has said – and consequentially taken offence. Charles wrote you a binder of information to support you with the pack finances last year and _you didn’t open it_.”

__

There it was. There was the blame. Leah had lost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. She had been embarrassed and ashamed. No one had ever openly said anything to her but she had known what they were thinking. She stared at the ground, flushing with outrage and embarrassment. Managing the finances had been a nightmare. Charles' instructions had been like trying to understand a dead language.

__

“You should have told me.” Bran ran his hands through his sandy hair which flopped back into place. “I would have helped you.”

__

Leah bit back the desire to say that Bran had never before demonstrated much interest in helping her but something must have shown on her face because he shook his head regretfully and, this time, when he approached, she had no where to go. He didn’t touch her, just stood close enough she could feel his warmth. His hazel eyes were painfully kind, so close to her she could see the different flecks of green and brown and gold. “This is a thing you cannot help, Leah. It is not something to be ashamed of. Despite what you may think of me, I do not want you to suffer.”

__

“Not unless you cause it,” she said, nastily.

__

He reached up, slowly, and traced the line of her hair, fingers brushing her cheek. “I do not want that, either,” he murmured, consideringly.

__

“Don’t you?” Her voice was tremulous.

__

“No, not at all.” Bran leaned forward and pressed his lips against her forehead. It was the simplest sign of affection, the purest. Even as she leaned in to it, desperately, she felt the fresh heat of anger swell within her – she wanted to ruin it, _ruin this moment,_ shove his hypocrisy and his lies back in his face and _hurt him_ – and Bran placed his hand over her mouth and looked her in the eye. “Don’t,” he said, sternly. “We have hurt each other enough, don’t you think?”

“ _We?_ ” she said, muffled behind his hand.

“Fine. _I_. _I_ have hurt you enough. But let’s not pretend that you haven’t put the miles in as well,” he said.

She had nothing to say to that. He withdrew his hand from her mouth. 

Leah swallowed. "It's a terrible weakness, Bran." She was so ashamed.

"Not so terrible if we know about it. We can work on it. I just need to know." He kissed her forehead again and this time she enjoyed it for what it was. “Pax?” he said, lips moving against her skin.

She chewed on it and then, reluctantly, nodded. “Peace,” Leah agreed. 

She could do that. 

  
  
  



End file.
